COP31 opens in Antalya with climate finance — not new pledges — at the centre

The 31st United Nations climate conference, COP31, opens on Monday, November 9, in Antalya, Türkiye, and runs until November 20. It arrives at a difficult moment: wars, trade tensions and an energy crisis triggered by the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz have pushed climate down the political agenda, even as disasters linked to human-caused global warming multiply — from the tragedy in Nepal and Tibet to deadly heatwaves in Europe.

Expectations for the summit have focused more on its ability to send useful and concrete signals than on the outcome of the formal negotiations. No landmark decision is expected at this transitional COP. That is not a criticism of the gathering so much as a description of where the climate process stands: the big pledges are already on paper, and the question now is whether the system can turn them into delivery, and who pays for it.

A first: two presidents

COP31 is being run under an arrangement the UN climate process has not tried before. Türkiye hosts the conference and holds the presidency, with Murat Kurum, Türkiye’s minister of environment, urbanisation and climate change, as COP President. Australia leads the formal negotiations, with Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister for climate change and energy, serving as President of Negotiations. It is the first shared presidency in the roughly 30-year history of the talks, agreed at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, after rival hosting bids.

A World Leaders’ Summit is scheduled for November 11 and 12, in the first days of the talks. The conference is set to bring together around 60,000 people and several dozen leaders over two weeks on the Turkish Riviera. French President Emmanuel Macron will not attend, according to reporting ahead of the summit.

Before Antalya, a pre-COP meeting was held from October 5 to 8, with Fiji, Tuvalu and Australia partnering to deliver it — an effort to elevate the concerns of small island and climate-vulnerable states ahead of the main event.

The numbers that frame the talks

A UN synthesis published on October 27 shows why the summit matters, and why it is likely to disappoint anyone looking for a breakthrough. The 127 new national climate plans submitted by 154 parties, covering about 71 percent of 2019 global emissions, point to 2035 emissions on average 6 percent below 2019 levels, within a range of 0 to 12 percent. A pathway consistent with 1.5°C needs a cut of about 60 percent.

The Paris Agreement’s stated limit of 1.5°C is now slipping. In their fourth letter to the parties, the COP31 presidency team said the world is likely to exceed 1.5°C within a few years, with a peak of about 1.8°C in the best case. The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service declared on November 6 that 2026 is on track to be the second-hottest year ever recorded, and that cumulative planetary warming from 2023 to 2026 is likely to exceed the 1.5°C threshold set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Those numbers are the backdrop to every negotiation in Antalya. They are also the reason the summit’s organisers have billed it as an “implementation COP” — focused on turning previously announced national climate plans into action rather than negotiating new headline pledges.

The five priorities — and the money question

COP31 will focus on five priorities: accelerating electrification, turning climate commitments into bankable projects, mobilising public and private finance, strengthening climate adaptation, and protecting oceans. Food security has been listed alongside those priorities, and a forum on agriculture and food system resilience is scheduled for November 10.

But the central unresolved question is money: who finances climate adaptation in countries that did not cause the problem and cannot absorb its costs. The New Collective Quantified Goal — the finance framework intended to replace the broken $100 billion-per-year promise that developed nations made in 2009 and never fully delivered — is now in its fifth year of negotiation, and as of the summit’s opening, no agreed architecture exists.

The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report estimated that developing nations require between $127 billion and $5.8 trillion per year through 2050 for adaptation alone. UNEP’s Adaptation Gap Report, released on November 4, estimates that a tripling of adaptation finance would bring it to $85 to $120 billion a year, against estimated needs far higher. The V20 group of twenty climate-vulnerable developing nations is arriving in Antalya with demands for binding finance commitments covering both mitigation support and adaptation finance.

Türkiye’s own offer is an electrification pledge: raising electricity’s share of final energy consumption from about 24 percent today to 35 percent by 2035. On November 3, Brazil’s COP30 presidency published a voluntary roadmap for transitioning away from fossil fuels. Neither is a headline agreement. Both are the kind of incremental, practical step that this COP is built around.

What success looks like

COP31 is unlikely to produce a headline agreement. Its value will depend on whether its smaller decisions make it easier for countries to get money, use it, and show what it delivered. That work continues long after the conference closes on November 20.

It is also the first COP to take place since the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement took effect on January 27, 2026 — a fact that hangs over the talks even if it is not on the formal agenda. With the world’s largest historical emitter outside the agreement, the burden of leadership falls more heavily on the countries still inside it.

The test of Antalya, then, is not whether it produces a dramatic final declaration. It is whether, in a crisis-rocked world, the climate process can still send a strong enough message to resonate — and whether the finance architecture that has not kept its promises can finally be rebuilt into something that does.